Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

As the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, François Jacob, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates, Georges Canguilhem has exerted tremendous influence on the philosophy of science and French philosophy more generally. In Knowledge of Life, a book that spans twenty years of his essays and lectures, Canguilhem offers a series of epistemological histories that seek to establish and clarify the stakes, ambiguities, and emergence of philosophical and biological concepts that defined the rise of modern biology. How do (...) transformations in biology and modern medicine shape conceptions of life? How do philosophical concepts feed into biological ideas and experimental practices, and how are they themselves transformed? How does knowledge "undo the experience of life so as to help man remake what life has made without him, in him or outside of him?" Knowledge of Life is Canguilhem's effort to explain how the movements of knowledge and life come to rest upon each other. Published at the dawn of the genetic revolution and still pertinent today, the book tackles the history of cell theory, the conceptual moves toward and away from mechanical understandings of the organism, the persistence of vitalism, and the nature of normality in science and its objects. (shrink)

Dieu est mort et l'histoire moderne aussi, nous dit Georges Sebbag. La foi dans le progrès a disparu, la chronologie n'a plus cours, la flèche du temps s'est brisée. Le fil du temps a cédé la place au temps sans fil. Les hommes ne faisant plus l'histoire, les individus du grand nombre visionnent et fabriquent des microdurées. Ils ingèrent des clips, concoctent des vidéos en retouchant les images. Ainsi vibrionnent des myriades d'acteurs et de réalisateurs sur la scène ensorcelante (...) de la planète. Ainsi tourbillonnent des essaims de paillettes temporelles dans le for intérieur de chacun. La conscience historique s'est évaporée pour faire place au temps synthétique. Georges Sebbag décrit l'homme contemporain comme un individu euphorique et déprimé qui consomme avec frénésie des pastilles temporelles tout en dissimulant mal sa phobie du grand nombre. (shrink)

Avant-propos.--Saint Thomas d'Aquin, sa mission intellectuelle.--Saint Augustin, éducateur idéal.--La physionomie de Saint Français d'Assise.--Un grand coeur, Saint Albert le Grand.--Les thomistes et saint Augustin.

“Intentional content,” as I understand it, is whatever serves as the object of “propositional” attitude verbs, such as “think,” “judge,” “represent,” “prefer” (whether or not these objects are “propositions”). These verbs are standardly used to pick out the intentional states invoked to explain the states and behavior of people and many animals. I shall take the “normativity of the intentional,” or “Normativism,” to be the claim that any adequate theory of intentional states involves considerations of value not essentially involved in (...) the natural sciences. Thus, according to Normativism, whether or not someone thinks that fish sleep, or even can represent fish at all, depends upon making a judgment about the person’s goodness or rationality, of a sort that would not be involved in merely determining whether or not fish in fact sleep. (shrink)

Georges Rey presents a much-needed philosophical defense of Noam Chomsky's famous view of human language, as an internal, innate computational system. But he also offers a critical examination of problematic developments of this view, to do with innateness, ontology, intentionality, and other issues of interdisciplinary interest.

According to the “Folieism” I have been recently defending, communication is a kind of folie à deux in which speakers and hearers enjoy a stable and innocuous illusion of producing and hearing standard linguistic entities (“SLE”s) that are seldom if ever actually produced. In the present paper, after summarizing the main points of the view, I defend it against efforts of Barber, Devitt and Miščević to rescue SLEs in terms of social, response-dependent proposals. I argue that their underlying error is (...) a failure to appreciate the important shift of the explanatory locus in modern linguistics, from external objects to internal conceptions. I go on to show how (i) pace Devitt, this shift is entirely compatible with there being conventional aspects to language, and also serves to distinguish the ease of natural language from the waggle dance of the bees; and (ii) pace Barber and Smith, it is compatible with an appearance / reality distinction, and with reliance on testimony in epistemology. I conclude with further arguments about why, pace Collins and Matthews, intentionality is a crucial feature of linguistic explanation, even if it is ultimately spelt out largely in terms of computational role. (shrink)

Kant's masterpiece, Critique of Pure Reason, is universally recognized to be among the most difficult of all philosophical writing, and yet it is required reading in almost every course that covers modern philosophy. Most students find Critique of Pure Reason impenetrable without the help of secondary sources. While there are numerous advanced scholarly works on the topic, Dicker's is the first treatment explicitly designed for undergraduates to read alongside the primary text, rendering Kant's views accessible without oversimplifying them. His book (...) will be useful to both undergraduate and graduate students tackling this notoriously difficult yet highly influential thinker in courses in modern philosophy, epistemology, and Kant. (shrink)

The author of this major study compares the significantly different approaches to business ethics on both sides of the Atlantic and considers what they have to learn from each other. He has considerable experience of business ethics in both Europe and North America, having taught and researched the subject at the University of St Gallen in his native Switzerland before his appointment as Professor of International Business Ethics in the College of Business Administration, University of Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, USA. (...) Professor Enderle was also the founding Honorary Treasurer of the European Business Ethics Network and is an Associate Editor of this Review. (shrink)

Offers step-by-step techniques for a wide range of creative digital photography projects, from greeting cards, recipe pages, invitations, and illustrated books to panoramas, collages, bound photo albums, DVD slide shows, and Web galleries Perfect for the exploding digital photography market, which has grown from 6.7 million cameras sold in 2000 to a projected 42 million in 2005 Released to hit stores right after the 2004 gift-giving season, it's the perfect companion to the author's previous bestsellers, which include 50 Fast Digital (...) Camera Techniques. (shrink)

Dans son Discours de Métaphysique‚ Leibniz maintient que le concept individuel d'une substance comprend et permet la déduction de tous ses prédicats, et certains prédicats d'une substance lui appartiennent néanmoins d'une manière contingente. Arnauld objecta contre Leibniz que implique la fausseté de — ce qui démontre, selon Arnauld, l'absurdité de . En puisant les réponses de Leibniz à Arnauld dans leur Correspondence, l'auteur soutient que la position de Leibniz, pourvu qu'elle soit interprétée à la lumière des principes générales de sa (...) métaphysique, peux tenir compte d'une distinction véritable entre les propositions nécessaires et contingentes touchant les substances individuelles. Les prédicats d'une substance qui sont liés avec d'autres prédicats de la même substance grâce à une vérité gouvernée par le Principe de Contradiction sont nécessaires ; tandis que ceux qui sont liés avec d'autres prédicats grâce seulement aux principes de Raison Suffisante et de Perfection sont contingents. Mais ceci n'empêche pas que les prédicats contingents autant que les prédicats nécessaires peuvent être déduits du concept individuel complet d'une substance. (shrink)

Ce dictionnaire offre un répertoire des concepts les plus usités du marxisme.

Nous, êtres humains, sommes issus d'une longue évolution, minérale et cosmique d'abord, biologique et terrestre ensuite. Pour certains, nous aurions définitivement rompu avec un héritage ancestral qui faisait de nous des bêtes. Nous seuls serions capables du sens du bien et du sens du beau. Nous seuls serions doués de morale. Il existerait ainsi un fossé infranchissable entre le grand philosophe Emmanuel Kant et nos cousins les chimpanzés! Ou bien, au contraire, faut-il considérer que la morale et l'esthétique chez l'homme (...) plongent leurs racines dans le terreau de la «nature»? Les animaux ne sont-ils pas eux aussi capables de dévouement pour leurs proches? Nos cousins les primates ne peuvent-ils pas éprouver eux aussi des sentiments en face d'une belle chimpanzé? Bref, la découverte des «cultures animales» n'amène-t-elle pas à concevoir davantage de continuité entre l'homme et l'animal? (shrink)

Georges Rey; XV*—Semantic Externalism and Conceptual Competence, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 June 1992, Pages 315–334, https.